


through the narrow space between these bars

by alternatedoom



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Femdom, Hate Sex, Illidan Has Different Issues But Yep, Internalized Homophobia, Kink Meme, Maiev Has Issues, Non-Consensual Object Penetration, Non-Consensual Touching, Not Beta Read, Orgasm Denial, Photographic Memory, Self-Harm, Sexism, Sleep Deprivation, Snapshots, Torture, Virginity, Warcraft Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 11:07:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15484422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatedoom/pseuds/alternatedoom
Summary: Maiev Shadowsong hates him beyond the telling of it, and Illidan cannot fathom the reason why.





	through the narrow space between these bars

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Written for the World of Warcraft kink meme. Prompt was: _Illidan/Maiev hatesex_  
>  _They're bound together in complete loathing._  
>  _What happened in the Warden's Cage, either when she had Illidan captive, or after he turned the tables?_  
>  Two influencing anon follow-up comments were:  
>  _Hngh, Maiev teasing Illidan for days, leaving him caged and angry and perpetually aroused, until finally she lets him have release._  
>  and then _please let it be femdom_.  
> 

He wakes imprisoned.

In a display either so oblivious or so flagrantly malicious it gives him pause, his jailers have mounted his warglaives on the far wall outside his subterranean cell. Knowing the effort will be futile, he still attempts to summon his weapons to hand. 

Predictably, he fails. The air feels dense with sorcery of binding and keeping, and he can speak, but he lacks his sorcerous voice in this place. His mage's gestures come ineffectually, his fingers weighted down as though his hands are encased in thick mud. His magic is fully suppressed.

He no longer lives. He only exists, for the heavy enchantments on his cell hold him in a stasis. His captors never feed him, but he never hungers, and he never thirsts.

*

The question of his prominently displayed warglaives is soon answered. Maiev Shadowsong hates him beyond the telling of it, and Illidan cannot fathom the reason why. Her useless brother didn't die, after all.

Maiev and a few others take shifts supervising his cell in a pattern he cannot decode. But unlike Drelanim and Cordana and the other handful of jailers who stand beside his cell facing outward, Maiev sits facing him, and she watches him like a hawk. Her unforgiving seat waits outside even while it stands vacant, ever a harbinger of her return.

He thinks upon the world he sacrificed his freedom to save. Illidan has little use or patience for most people, because they tend to be bleating, ignorant fools. Yet he cares for them distantly, en masse, and would see to their safety even though they have thrown him into this delven hell. Still he would forgive them and be their champion. With fear he broods upon Sargeras and the implacability of the Burning Legion. He thinks upon the ones he loved who turned on him. Endlessly he thinks.

He has naught else to do.

*

Sometimes when one of her followers stands guard, Maeiv appears outside the iron bars of his prison, sets her torch in the wall sconce, dismisses her underling, and comes close to the iron bars to view Illidan in detail before she sits at last.

One night instead of sitting she binds him to the wall, enters and then inspects his cell, looking around as though checking for contraband. What she expects to discover, at first Illidan can't imagine. As though he has the means to acquire anything. As if any follower of Maiev Shadowsong would show him the tiniest act of kindness.

Perhaps she fears he might tunnel through the dirt walls like a mole, but such an escape is impossible. The enchantments woven through the earthen walls are thorough. Illidan faintly smiles at the mental picture, though.

Despite ostensibly ignoring him since she entered, Maiev notices his change of expression at once. "What is amusing, Betrayer?"

He smiles more fully before answering. "Oh, the ideas you give me, Warden."

Maiev takes two steps closer and slaps him. He's startled into silence. The sting lasts only a moment.

Illidan decides Maiev is investigating so closely because she's convinced of his cunning and his competence in the face of a challenge. He would not say he's flattered, because that would imply he cares in the least about her opinion, but he takes the cell inspection as a compliment. And despite Maiev's obvious hubris, her wariness of his ingenuity shows her caution.

*

Another cell inspection. Illidan feels like he suffered through one not long prior, but he's not about to argue the point.

Slowly Maiev twists the winches to pull his chains taut.

Illidan cooperates, moving back into position against the wall, partly because fighting never accomplishes anything, and partly because often as not, when he waits until the force of the chains pulls him backwards, he ends up pinned against the wall in a wretchedly uncomfortable stress position, his upper arms rotated painfully in their sockets. It's undignified of course as well, but he doesn't particularly care about his dignity now. Rather, he simply has no reason not to cooperate. And even with three hundred and sixty degree vision, even helpless as he is here, he'd rather be facing Maiev Shadowsong than have his back to her.

Once he's secured against the wall, standing with his back flattened to the cold earth and without even an inch of give in the fetters keeping his arms outstretched, Maiev slowly removes her plumed helm, revealing her face in profile. She likewise removes her gauntlets, setting the three pieces of armor down on the seat of her austere chair. Illidan watches her, wary that she's removing some of her armor, uncertain what that might indicate. Probably he's in for some kind of furious sermon.

He's still weighing her actions as she unlocks the door and comes inside. He has not seen her without her helm since before he was delivered into the barrows. He can look beneath the exteriors of armor or clothing if he so chooses, though the effort of that narrow focus tends to make his head hurt after a short time.

Maiev appears the same as he remembers. Her face is a bit battle-scarred. Her shoulder-length hair is the same snowy color as the plume in her helm, flattened from the headpiece. Her skin is pale and her expression harsh, but she has a compelling look all the same. She moves with an abbreviated grace, as if her movements could be fluid if she wanted them to be, if she cared to comport herself with the elegance prized in kaldorei women. She emanates arrogance and self-righteousness.

"Warden," he says politely, his voice heavy with sarcasm. He hates her yet cannot help but engage with her. Her visits are the most lively and pleasant diversion he gets outside the boundaries of his own mind... which given her frosty manner, cutting words, and proclivity for clobbering him when he talks says terrible things of his imprisonment.

Instead of ignoring him and walking the short perimeter of his cell, Maiev comes to stand before him. The torchlight flickers behind her.

To his surprise, she reaches for him. He's puzzled, feeling the faint quiver and pull of fabric at his hips, and as his vision focuses he sees she's unlacing his leggings, her movements slow and deliberate.

He's too stunned to say anything for an instant, feeling like there must be some confusion. His protest dies in his throat as his voice deserts him, and he only stands there shocked. His leggings slide over his hips and down to the flagstones, and the look in Maiev's eyes says there is no mistake.

He jerks in his fetters, feeling his heart pound. "What are you doing?!"

Maiev looks down and surveys his cock, thoughtfully taking in the sight. His cock hangs long and thick, and she looks less impressed than she should, but he's stricken beyond the taking of offense. Later it will bother him.

Maiev's voice sounds bland, bored even as she brushes fingertips over his exposed skin. "Your punishment, Betrayer."

"Take your hands off me," he snarls.

Maiev smiles with open malevolence. "I think not."

Her fingers constrict around his cock, and he can't rein in his gasp.

He tries to twist his pelvis away, but of course there's no place for him to go. A few inches at most in either direction.

Anger surges again and unfurls within him. "This is not yours to take from me!"

Maiev's icy smile vanishes, but her fingers persist, loosening to an intoxicating pressure and beginning to stroke him. "The lives you have taken were not yours to take."

Worst of all, his body responds to her. His cock stiffens quickly under her slow, teasing fingers.

"Stop--" he says, desperate before he breaks off. He will not beg. He will endure whatever he must. He vows to conceal his distress, to offer her no further satisfaction.

He realizes his chest is heaving and tries to slow his breathing. His druidic training comes back to him and he closes his eyes and begins a calming exercise. _Calm as the wind at rest, slow as the setting sun--_

No one else has ever touched him this way. All his life, his golden eyes drew others to his side like a tray full of gooey spider cakes; men and women of lesser destinies pulled by envy or admiration to the shadow of his greatness. Even without his eyes he is handsome still, and with his new sight he is more powerful than ever. He was the most naturally talented druidic student and then the most skilled arcanist. Since adolescence he's always had plenty of offers, plenty of interest, but he's only ever wanted Tyrande, and he would not settle for less than his heart's true desire. And so the most he's done sexually is stroke himself.

_Tyrande, I was waiting for you..._

He fights to set his mind straight. _Quiet as the sweeping grass--_

Maiev plays with his foreskin, then rolls the loose fold of skin back just as he often does to himself, exposing the head of his cock, and Illidan's head tumbles back against the earth with the second of near-enrapturing pleasure. Thinking about anything other than his mindfulness technique jerks his awareness back to what's happening, not that his awareness ever made it far off, and her next touches grind his mental exercise to a full halt. Maiev's fingers lavishly explore him, her fingertips caressing the underside of his cock and rubbing the sensitive tip.

He feels sick at heart to have her doing this to him, but he flexes his hips because he's unable to stop himself. Her fingers tantalize his glans, skating his foreskin gently back and forth, the silky feel of her flesh against his flesh somehow different from the feel of his own. Pearly drops of wetness gather at the tip, and Maiev fingers his slit and smears the droplets around before pulling his foreskin back overtop, making the head of his cock deliriously slippery. Illidan feels like he's losing his mind. The physical pleasure is so vast that his will to resist her falters and his legs open, turning outwards for her like a pair of petals.

Maiev uses this improved access to reach down and tickle his undercarriage, and what feels even more deeply erotic is when she cups his balls in her hand, balancing his sack on a few of her fingers like she's weighing its heft on a scale. His toes tingle and when she trails her fingertips lightly down his thigh, he feels aware of all the places his skin suddenly cries out to be touched. She alternates massaging his cock in different ways until he's gasping and juddering into her hands, but she nevers settle on a specific manner of touch in the same fashion long enough for him to come.

After another couple of minutes of the same, when he gets a hair's breadth away from climax and she takes her hands away entirely, he realizes she means not to let him.

"You despicable bitch," he manages, instinctively thrusting his cock forward but finding only empty air. The frustration is immense. "Why are you doing this?"

Maiev's eyes say she's pleased by his rage. "This is all part of your punishment, Betrayer. I will mete out justice, ensure that you suffer for your crimes, even if no one else will."

Maiev brings him to the edge again and stops, her fierce grip subsiding to the stroke of a single fingertip along the vein.

Illidan grunts, again helplessly pushing his cock towards her, which she ignores. Wholly debauched, and now denied. He finds his voice. "Being entombed alive is not enough?"

Maiev looks up from under her lashes, making what would be eye contact, and Illidan needs no response to know that the answer is no.

The torment goes on for what feels like hours, until at last, leaving him shuddering with his need, Maiev exits the cell. She closes and locks the barred door and sits in her chair, donning her helm and gauntlets and watching him until his dark violet, pulsing erection at last deflates. Only then does Maiev rise and unwind the winches.

"Don't believe you have any right to release," Maiev tells him as she turns the wheels to permit him freedom of limb. "This is a prison, not a den of pleasure."

His first act is to yank up his leggings, holding them closed over his hips. Still somewhat in shock, and with clear thought made difficult by the pressing discomfort of his unresolved state, Illidan struggles to make sense of her actions.

As if she'd been just outside, waiting for her superior's cue, Drelanim enters after Maiev disappears down the opening of the barrow tunnel.

Illidan curls up on the floor. He feels ravished, but only halfway. He's been touched sexually for the first time, but by someone who hates him and meant to shame him. And he is shamed. His balls ache, radiating throbbing, painful pressure from his sack high up into the pit of his stomach. He's never felt so in need of climax, because he would never deny himself a release so sorely needed. He's sure his come would spurt all the way across his cell, but he ignores the need to empty his balls. Even if he wasn't averse to the idea of stroking himself in the presence of his guard, he's too shaken by Maiev's actions to want to finish despite the severe physical discomfort.

The dull pain from the sexual build-up remains uneased by the enchantments of his cage.

*

Memory keeps him sane. Blessedly, he has many, clear and bright. A wealth of memory. If he's pleased to have sacrificed his eyes for his glorious omni-sight of the mind, he's a hundred times more grateful for his ability to recreate the past like moving paintings in his mind, looking at all aspects, taking care with every brushstroke to each face, the clothes and ornamentation chosen, the rooms he visited and their contents, the lushness of the natural world outside. He transplants details from other times to fill in the gaps where his recollections are lacking.

He remembers the good and the bad without discrimination. His proud junctures shore up his faith in himself, and though for other choices he's been condemned, he knows his reasons were rooted in noble intentions. Even the times replete with sorrow and anger--the instant he realized beyond any question that Tyrande preferred Malfurion to him--strengthen him.

(Even if he still can't figure out _why_...)

He thinks on the demons he's slain, thousands of them, remembering the myriad ways they fell to his blades. He thinks on the look and smell of their noxious blood as the fluid violently erupted from mortal wounds and severed limbs. He pictures their lifeless corpses splayed on earth and stone afterwards.

He thinks on his time as Ravencrest's personal sorceror. Ravencrest turned out to be an utter fool in the end, incapable of yielding wishes to reality, but he'd raised Illidan up independent of the Moon Guard, leading to him being informally in charge of the other mages when they were thrown together. Partly because of his skill at their craft, and partly due to his natural propensity for command, they looked to him for leadership. He remembers the cadre of the courageous who on that fateful evening in the ramparts and the courtyard gave their all. He recalls some of their names and faces. Their power, their collective life force remains with him even now. He knows he did the right thing. Tyrande yet lives, after all. Illidan distinguished himself, and their people survive and thrive.

He remembers the boundless holdfast looming over the sea and the long stretches of farmland surrounding Black Rook, beautiful and arable even so close to the ocean. In his mind he recreates the great beauty of Moondew Vale and the cave behind the upper waterfall. No detail is too small. He remembers the Moon Guard's arching towers high in the mountain cliffs. On a clear night, with a full moon, all of the elvish lands to the south were visible below, and the sea beyond where the land ended. But no towers stood more glorious than Suramar's.

He pores over each memory of his time spent hiking up the Whispering Bluffs alone. Many of those occasions compress and weave together, for he singlehandedly wore a path through those hills over the years. A few stand out, like the time he found an elaborate, nameless memorial placed beside a tree. He remembers just how the moonlight slanted through the meadows of the Field of Dreams at midnight.

The serene lakes of Val'sharah could never be anything other than immaculate, with the flashing stars circling around the groves. Even disliking most kaldorei as he does, is there any wonder he would have gone to any lengths to save their homeland, their way of life, their very being? He deserved to have honor heaped upon him. Instead they threw him into this dank cell.

But his thoughts are veering off track now.

He thinks of sitting beside Tyrande in the Temple grounds, talking and trailing his hand through the water of one of the reflecting pools, on one of the occasions he had her all to himself. He reminisces about a more youthful time secreted behind a particular shimmershade tree, playing at juvenile experimentation, when first he kissed Tyrande and then Malfurion did, taking turns. He remembers the half-night they stumbled upon a pair of lovers mid-interlude hidden in the tiny park off the Midnight Court, and the laughter they only partly held back as they made their awkward apologies and ran away.

Had he been alone, Illidan would have liked to have stayed and watched from the shadowed greenery, seeing what he could learn. Secretly he's watched other couples who thought themselves alone, and of course he's since learned the variety of things he wanted to know, but the woman the three of them chanced upon that night was particularly beautiful in a way that left an impression. She resembled the Tyrande of now, Tyrande as a woman grown. Illidan thinks of her breasts, round and high and firm.

He thinks of the times he's watched Tyrande, silently following her on starlit walks through the trees, watching her from a guarded distance during her private devotions to Elune. He's watched her more companionably from a few feet away, pretending to enjoy nature while Tyrande lay on her front in the grass and perused a heavy book with her calves up, her ankles crossed in the air, and the faintest line of concentration between her brows. He's watched her with Malfurion, passionately arguing some nuance of astrology. Her star-maps held no real interest to him, but he sat beside her at her credenza and listened to her talk animatedly of her studies all the same. Far better were the times they did actual star-gazing under a new or crescent moon. At the full and gibbous moons, the nights shone too bright to see the planetary bodies at their intensest glitter, but those nights were excellent for hunting, and most satisfying of all were their hunts together through the forests, practicing their tracking skills, playfully competitive. He wanted to prove himself worthy of her, but now he knows he should have simply taken her in his arms, kissed her and told her his heart's great wish. And when she said yes, overwhelmed by the depths of his ardor, he should have laid her down upon the forest floor and taken her then and there in the thicket. Forevermore she would have been his love. Malfurion would have dwindled in her mind, become but the whisper of a dream.

Somenight he will untangle the mystery of Tyrande's choice.

All he has left are his memories and his anger, and so his throughts travel in long meandering circles. All his clearest recollections are tied up in the ones who turned their backs on him, and their betrayal pains him. Yet he fears that if he fails to revisit each remembrance, pull each out and turn it around in his mind, examining all the little details, his memory will atrophy and dwindle.

And if that happens, nothing will save him.

*

From time to time Maiev gives him a few feet's worth of arm movement in his chains, removes his leggings, and administers a bath by bringing him a bucket of water, a cloth and a bar of soap. She waits with a disdainful look under her helm as he washes, then dumps two additional buckets over him when he's finished. The water is lukewarm and the process leaves his cell even more damp and watery than usual. After the first time, he learns to take his baths on the opposite side of the cell from where he prefers to sit.

After a few hours, or sometimes the next night, she brings him a tortoiseshell comb and sits to watch him straighten and smooth out his hair. Maiev lets him keep the comb for as long as he continues to use it, so he spends a long time on his hair, running the carved teeth through his tatted mane until his hair is silky and both his arms grow weary, and even then sometimes he continues, combing until his hair is shining and glossy with well-distributed oils far beyond what he'd have thought Maiev would allow, far beyond what grooming and beauty a prisoner needs. She probably has no way to know he can look at her face beneath her helm, not unless Malfurion or Tyrande told her, and she watches him tend his locks with a strange avarice that leaves him nonplussed.

He keeps the comb as long as he dares before he finally rises, going to the bars and handing the carved hairpiece out to her. He wonders why Maiev hasn't forcibly trimmed his hair; it would save her time spent sitting in front of his cell.

Often a long time passes, many cycles of sleep, before his leggings are thrown back in at him. The scarf Lady Vashj gave him--the last gift anyone made him--never returns, laying his brilliant twin fire eyes bare for all to see. Then while he sleeps, his scarf appears outside his cell, cleaned and neatly folded, hung and tucked into his crossed warglaives.

When Maiev next shows her face, Illidan looks up at her. "Why take my scarf?"

Maiev's eyes gleam. "Your blindfold? But Betrayer, why so eager to hide what you've become?"

*

After the brutality and sexual torment of Maiev's visits, he takes a break from the wanderings of his mind to cerebrate in detail on what vengeance he will somenight repay upon her. Those lines of thought give him more self-control than any druidic exercise ever could.

One night, after Maiev leaves, Cordana fails to immediately return. His groin throbbing and his head swimming from the hours Maiev spent ramping up his arousal, Illidan's too far gone to resist the chance at relief.

Quickly he encloses his half-tumescent cock in one hand, cups his heavy, aching balls in the other, and surreptitiously he tugs himself to completion. After what must have been two or three hours of her ruthless teasing, the process takes little time, and as he arches up into his hand, the feeling of release is an explosion of carnal ecstasy and relief beyond any he's known.

Unfortunately, after he jets up into the air and spills over his hands and thighs, he opens his mind's eye and realizes she's there. Watching him.

Illidan lowers his wet hands, resting them at his sides, exposing his cock to her. "Warden," he says, rich with sarcasm. "May I call you Maiev? Such intimate moments we share."

Maiev turns and walks away.

For a while after that, when she finishes with him, she leaves him manacled tightly to the packed-earth wall.

*

Maiev often strands him in the fully outstretched winched position for what might be mere hours, but feels like multiple nights or even weeks. He can't sleep standing up, which leaves him, sometimes, raving. He thinks she likes that.

Pain is a funny thing inside the cage. He's experimented with pain. The blows Maiev inflicts upon him heal right away, and he's performed his own tests. He scratched his arm, then lightly bit the flesh, just enough to break the skin. While he can injure himself and be injured, and though he hurts, the scratches disappeared instantly. With that in mind he deeply dug his teeth all the way to the bone of his forearm, tasting blood and searing pain, then watched his wounds seamlessly knit together with unnatural speed, as if they never existed at all.

Pain from injury lasts but a moment or two. But the perpetual dull pain from his fixed position is ongoing and thus becomes agonizing.

The next time she leaves him with his cock hard and his chains loose, he meticulously keeps his hands off himself, pretending not to feel the pressing need that radiates up into his abdomen, aching.

*

Illidan gets a new, nearly full-time guard, a Keeper of the Grove and son of Cenarius: Califax, who smells of wildkin guano and seems entirely made of disapproval. From an overheard conversation between them at the changing of the guard, Illidan gathers Cordana and Drelanim find standing by to ensure his captivity a dreadfully boring and unnecessary task. Califax, on the other hand, seems to take pride in standing outside his cell for hours on end, as if such duty requires any special skill.

*

A handful of times Maiev visits him flush with the scent of cenarion wine. She's not staggeringly drunk but is certainly impaired, and this behavior interests him because Maiev comes off as an ascetic and probably hypercritical of the vices of others. Though she stays reasonably steady on her feet, the alcohol is strong on her breath, and she rarely assaults him sexually when she gets intoxicated. Sometimes she hurts him, sometimes merely insults him. Illidan doesn't mind either one. Her verbal barbs are predictable and thus rather pathetic, and the pain reminds him he's alive and lasts only briefly. And he enjoys the scent of wine, even mixed as it is with Maiev's breath in his face. He can see the winestains on her lips, smirching the flesh a rich purple.

Maiev seethes at him during these times as though she has a private score to settle, as though he's personally ruined her life. "You are a traitor to your own people," she starts. "Evil. A monster."

At some point during the past... however long it's been, between his enduring solitude and her degrading, hate-filled screeds, Illidan began to be able to see himself through her eyes. Really see himself. Physically he needs no mirror or still water; with the fire Sargeras gave him he knows what he looks like, but now he can visibly understand how twisted he appears to her with his ocular green flames and the fel markings over his body. How warped and evil. A few hundred years of this and her malice and loathing might start to affect him. Her hate for him might somenight start to seep into his own heart, or his hate for her might start to change him from within.

He says only, "I know what I am. Which is more than you can say about yourself."

If Maiev is generally spoiling for a reason to hit him, consumption of drink leaves her even more thin-skinned and belligerent than normal. She grabs his chin as one might reprimand a defiant child, all open hostility and menace. "What is that supposed to mean, murderer?"

"You're a mountain of pretenses, that is what it means," Illidan says mildly, knowing violence will follow. "You're savage, and you delude even yourself into thinking otherwise."

Maiev hits him, an elegant backhand that connects square against Illidan's cheekbone and whips his head to the left.

"With every strike you make my point for me," he says, feeling the reverberation.

She punches him on the other side, this time landing nearer his mouth. Illidan feels the skin break.

"And I'm the monster," Illidan says, and Maiev pins his throat to the wall. He swallows hard past the webbing between her thumb and forefinger, and her hand is pressed hard enough into his neck, obstructing enough, that he has to force the reflex. Maiev has fearsomely strong hands.

"Yes, you are," Maiev counters, and she pulls her fist back and punches him in the throat.

He chokes and croaks. When he finishes a round of coughing and healing and manages to speak, his voice comes out raspy and hoarse. "Do Tyrande and my brother know how much you enjoy restraining and beating me, I wonder? Doing other things to me?"

Maiev removes her hand, shaking her fingers out as if hitting him hurt her. "You ask as though you believe either of them would care."

Those words, those words hurt more than being punched in the throat.

But he feigns remaining copacetic and appraises her lazily. He prefers these nights to the nights of sexual torment, because with his tongue he can always best Maiev in the end. When his cock is involved she tends to get the better of him. "I merely wonder if either of them realize what sort of serpent they've nursed to their breast. I doubt either of them knows what you really are."

Maiev scoffs. "And you believe you do?"

"Oh yes," Illidan says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "I already know you better than anyone, I think."

"You think wrong," Maiev spits, and he knows he's gotten under her skin.

Though the gash has already sealed closed, Illidan feels a trickle of blood near his lip. The sensation tickles uncomfortably, but his arms are fully outstretched and he couldn't swipe it away even if he wanted to. "We spend ever so much time together. I'm your pet project--"

"You are nothing to me, Betrayer!"

"--of course I did have other aspirations, but here we are. Tell me, have you enjoyed inflicting pain on helpless things all your life?"

"Quiet, " Maiev snaps.

"Do you hurt animals? Not hunting the large forest predators, but the small creatures, unable to defend themselves?"

Maiev hits him again. "You'd like that, wouldn't you."

"You can tell me. With whom could I share your secrets?"

Maiev drives her fist into his abdomen.

"You are cruel," Illidan breathes. "And this is dishonorable. It's all right, I don't think they quite know."

"I should cut out your tongue," she hisses, and the idea makes a flash of fear blink through him-- _would it grow back?_ \--but he immediately rebuffs the apprehension, for he feels sure she won't follow through on that threat.

"You won't," he says confidently. "You enjoy engaging with me far too much for that."

"Try me," Maiev says. 

But she wouldn't. She wouldn't want him to be boring, and Malfurion could hardly help but notice if his tongue suddenly went missing and then they would know that Maiev is more a monster than Illidan could dream of becoming on his most immoral night.

"Do your worst, Warden," Illidan proclaims. Bold to the last.

She beats him bloody, and thereafter starts gagging him with his own scarf during their sessions. The mouthful of scarf lasts only a short time, however, probably because his irrepressible lip gives her more justifications to hit him. He knew she liked his tongue.

*

Attempting to gratify himself clandestinely does not avail him. The Watchers must have some manner of surveillance spell on his prison, because Maiev somehow knows, and he ends up winched tightly for his breach of her rules.

Later, after she's let him down, he picks at the dirt between two flagstones, only realizing a minute in that he's half-consciously digging a hole in which he might discreetly seek relief. Disgusted with himself, he dashes the ounce of dirt across the cell.

*

Illidan idly runs a long fingernail down the length of his inner arm, just for the stimulation of sharp, controlled pain. He despises pain as much as anyone else, but sensation is valuable in here, and he can sit and cut himself and heal for hours. But he has to concentrate to watch the dark, thin indentation instantly vanish, and the resulting strain of that particularly focused sight sometimes gives him a dull headache he dislikes, a dull headache that the cell enchantments do not touch. So he relaxes his inner optical focus, sits in the dark, and settles for experiencing the sensation he can control.

Sometimes he switches from arm to thigh.

His wrist shackles catch his attention when the side of one hand brushes against the iron surrounding the other, and he opens his inner eye and takes a good long look at his bonds. He's examined them before, of course, and pulled on them past the point of pain, but he's motivated as never before, and knowing what he now knows about his cell's enchantments, he wonders if he can fracture his metacarpals to squeeze his hands out of the cuffs around his wrists. Holding a cuff in his opposite hand, he pulls and feels pain. He pulls even harder and the pain increases dramatically, but he still cannot pull his hand through. He stops and reconsiders, noting the dark purple ring around his hand where the metal indents his skin and muscle, then carefully spits around the perimeter between his wrist and the cuff. Then he draws his chain taut and tries again as forcefully as he can, determined to break either his metacarpal or the iron shackle.

His thumb gives first.

To his shocked pleasure, in a burst of pain his thumb finally snaps under the pressure and his wrist slips out. For half a second he considers the possibilities, then shoves his broken hand back through the circle of the manacle before his thumb can heal.

He can break out. His heart races, hammering with such elation he barely feels the pain of his broken bone as it heals.

His cell stays locked except for the times Maiev binds him tightly to the wall and enters, so he will have to make his attempt while she's in the cage with him. He will have to fight her. Even knowing it's what he must do, he hesitates to simply slip his bonds, try to overpower her and make his escape attempt. Much as he hates the fact, Maiev might be the superior warrior if he cannot utilize his magic. Having two broken thumbs will put him at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat, if only for a few precious moments.

Those moments will be everything.

Even if he can escape his cell, he knows a sprawling and unfamiliar labyrinth of tunnels awaits him beyond. The barrows that run beneath Mount Hyjal continue for thousands upon thousands of miles underground through Kalimdor, he's heard the figure four thousand tossed around, and he knows some tunnels progress for leagues only to prove dead ends or tumuli complete with long-decayed skeletons. The spells smothering his cell do not hinder use of his incredible new vision within the cell, but he cannot expand his sight to view outside its confines. Once outside his cage, with the full use of his magic and hopefully all his faculties restored, he hopes to track the well-walked paths and stay on them, but he has no way to discover the specific route out. Nor can he know how many guards lie between him and freedom or what weapons they might have. The element of surprise may not be enough; he's unsure how weak he might be once he emerges from the cage that has long sustained his body with sorcery alone.

The smart call is to bide his time, to wait for an ideal instant to act. He knows he will have only one chance. Perhaps when Maiev next comes to him inebriated.

*

Given that Maiev knows when he has given in to sexual temptation, for a time he fears she or another jailer might have witnessed him successfully yanking his hand from his cuff, but given no blacksmith shows up to clamp him into narrower irons, he decides his efforts must have been missed. And for a while thereafter, though his nerves jangle, knowing he has a plan to bolt this wretched place makes enduring Maiev a bit easier to take. 

"What makes this hate so personal?" he asks one night. It's difficult not to be bitter, and even knowing she loathes him, he defends himself to her because she's the only other creature around (Califax, Cordana and Drelanim all refuse to engage in prolonged conversation with him). "Everything I have done, I have done for Aze--"

Maiev hits him full in the face and his head strikes the hard-packed earth at the back of the cell. The blow is sufficiently forceful that even though he's well-accustomed to being struck, Illidan gasps, his speech successfully broken off. 

"For selfish reasons," Maiev finishes for him. Although her words could have doubled, Illidan thinks, as an answer to his original question.

"I truly wish to know, Maiev. Why so determined to detest me?"

"Silence, demon-lover."

Maiev runs a hand slowly through his chaotic hair as though admiring the tumble it makes over his shoulders, parting the knots as her fingers comb through with a gentleness foreign to her touch. Illidan raises his eyebrows and she looks away, then walks away.

"You need a bath. You stink," Maiev says over her shoulder.

"You should give Califax a bath," Illian suggests. "I can smell him coming down the tunnel a mile away."

Maiev locks his cell and turns the winches.

"I have been wondering--this cell has every other kind of enchantment. Why not one to keep occupants from sweating?"

Maiev's departing footfalls are his only answer.

*

Maiev touches him against his will and he bristles with hatred, and having had this experience forced on him, he wonders what Tyrande's version of this touch would feel like. Tyrande would never be devious nor rough, would never taunt him and leave him groaning in pain from unfulfillment--

Annoyed with himself, he shakes out of that line of thinking. He will not sully Tyrande's memory by conjuring up her face in his mind at these moments, any more than he would have taken mediocre solace in the arms of someone else when he had the opportunity. He would not settle then, and he will not falter in his devotion now. He is the eastern star. His love for her is the truest feeling he's ever known, his guiding light even in this incessant black darkness.

He will safeguard her memory, keep her pure in his mind. He has all the time in the world to consider what might have been with Tyrande. Later, when he is alone.

After Maiev has finished with him, after his cock has gone soft and his groin has finally stopped throbbing and aching, he lies on the floor and thinks her name again and again, his secret mantra, his holiest prayer. Tyrande. Tyrande. Tyrande.

_Tyrande, how could you do this to me?_

*

He tries, when Maiev takes his traitorous cock in her hand, to simply go away inside. Maiev has clever fingers, though, and she proves deft at drawing him out of the distance he attempts to maintain.

"Why are you doing this?" he asks, feigning boredom when he cannot ignore the arousal any longer.

"Because of you, I have nothing better to do," Maiev answers, scratching a set of sharp fingerails along the skin around his cock, ruffling gently through the thatch of hair at his groin, lightly raking the skin beneath in a way that somehow rouses all his sexual appetites. Maiev uses her hands like an art form, her motions flowing like the priestess she was; once devoted to divine worship of Elune, and now dedicated to making him suffer.

Illidan shifts his hips, hating himself but unable to help the instinct to arch into her sensual hands. Her fingers are calloused in a way that speaks of weapon training, but she's remarkably delicate in her touches. He is weak, so weak when it comes to her unconscionable handling.

"An injustice was done when Malfurion commuted your sentence, and he only did so because you are his brother," Maiev says suddenly. "You were judged unworthy of life and slated to die. The decision should have been with one who was wronged. It was not Malfurion's choice to make."

As Illidan recalls, Jarod loudly implored Malfurion to collaborate with him on Illidan's fate. "I see." Illidan considers. "So to you, this is... ameliorating a miscarriage of justice."

"If you like."

"I do not."

Maiev's smiles are thin but infrequent enough to be notable, and she allows him to thrust into her hand. _So weak._ With the most heroic of efforts Illidan makes himself stop moving.

"It sounds as though you have a problem with the abuse of power," Illidan drawls, loading his words with all the irony he can.

Maiev refuses to take the bait. "My brother is weak. He should never have allowed Malfurion to overrule his right to judgement."

"If that were truly why you chose to guard me, your mission would be a fool's errand. You should go have a real life. You could, if you wanted to." Illidan inclines his head, studying her. "So you can hit me if you care to, but I give little credence to your --"

"If you like," Maiev repeats evenly, and she strikes him.

*

Sometimes sleep brings relief, when thoughts of Tyrande fill his mind and conclude in vivid, euphoric wet dreams. He awakens trembling as he comes, for the ejaculations originating within the sexual fantasies of his sleep have always felt more intense and powerful than those he gets in the normal course of onanism.

A joy anytime such unexpected pleasure and relief occurs. Illidan doesn't mind the messy aftermath, though a rag would go a long way towards clean-up.

Those days are all too rare. Had he a choice, he would dream of Tyrande every day.

*

He's hard. He breathes deeply and tries to will it away, but Maiev slides her hand up between his thighs, tickling the sensitive skin where legs meet torso. She's wearing a dagger at her hip tonight, and Illidan eyes the blade. Of course if he slit her throat in this cell the death wound would heal. He would need to drag her out of the cage, then deal the mortal blow in the tunnel outside. He could wrench from his bonds and attack her now, but he hesitates to do so on impulse, without forethought or preparation.

After she edges him a few times, Maiev unsheathes the dagger. Holding his cock suspended with her index finger nestled under the foreskin on the tip, with the dagger in her other hand she makes long, deep incisions along his cock like she's a seamstress cutting a slashed sleeve. Illidan steels himself and reacts as little as possible, watching and enduring the pain that blooms a second after the cuts well red. Because his cock is stiff and heavy with blood, her slices bleed dramatically. Together they watch the cuts open, gush forth blood, and close until his cock is drenched and dripping. Blood saturates the hair at his groin, gradually congealing the fur into clumps.

"Your dagger is too sharp," he challenges her, which is true, and he lies: "I barely feel these."

Without warning Maiev buries the dagger in his gut, and he gasps. "I do wonder how you became so cruel," he manages.

"This is merely discipline," Maiev pronounces. "You are consistently impudent, and would do well to remember who is in charge here." As the last cut finishes healing, she takes his cock in her hand and her grip grows tight. Too tight.

Illidan bears the discomfort stoically, and he has always dared too much, perhaps. "Oh, instructive, not cruel. I see. Certainly not abusive of a prisoner in your power."

"You love this," Maiev says coldly.

Illidan laughs, because the thought is absurd. Maiev strips her hand up and down his shaft, and his laugh turns into a groan and his hips move helplessly. "What is there here to love?"

"You want attention. You crave it, all eyes on you--"

"You're insane," he says over her, his voice shaking. "I hate this. And I hate you. And I think," he gasps on a flash of insight, "that it is you who loves this, I think you hate me because you're obsessed with me--"

Maiev cuts him off louder and drops his cock. "Like you, stalking Priestess Whisperwind all over Val'sharah?"

Illidan's startled she knows the direction his heart yearns, but he maintains a front of calm. "Tyrande was a friend I wished to court. I never stalked her." 

_Stalking, what a word._

"Stop trying to change the subject," he finishes.

"She clearly wasn't interested and you clearly didn't care," Maiev says.

_She was interested, she was._

"Here's a better question then, since you claim to know so much of my heart." Illidan lets his head droop deceptively, his flame-gaze intently focused on her. "Were you stalking me?"

Maiev's lips purse tightly. The expression is not kind on her. "Your obsession was obvious to anyone with eyes," Maiev says. The words sting, and Illidan wonders if they're true. "But yes, back to the subject at hand. You're an egomaniacal multiple murderer who consorts with demons, betrayed our people to Azshara, betrayed us a second time to the Legion, and poisoned the lake at Mount Hyjal with magic, and I believe you have earned righteous punishment." Abruptly she pinches the skin on the head of his cock, too small a piece of skin, too hard, using her fingernails. Sometimes he can bite the insides of his lips or with clenched teeth stifle his cries, other times she takes him unawares and the sounds of pain simply escape his mouth with him powerless to stop them.

Now is the latter.

Illidan grits his teeth. "I think wanting to do this to me is the real reason you so eagerly volunteered to be my jailer."

"No. I wanted you dead," Maiev corrects. "Quickly, by my hand, after you tried to kill my brother. Once I learned the full extent of your crimes, I was with those who wanted to give you union with a tree."

Illidan stops, stunned into silence.

The kaldorei have no more protracted nor more brutal means of inflicting death, and as they reserve the method for the most abhorrent wrongdoers, thousands of years can pass between such executions. Illidan has never seen that sentence carried out, but he's walked beneath the trees in that grisly grove. He never thought he might one night number among them. He remembers Malfurion telling him once with a troubled expression: _we are a good people, a devout people in harmony with magic and nature, but we are not a merciful people._

His heart sinking, he tunes Maiev out. He should have been celebrated as a hero, a legend in the making, but instead his former people believe him an irredeemable villain, deserving of sadism and ignominy and more. He knew he was not beloved for his efforts to save their world, he heard death pronounced as his punishment before Malfurion interrupted the proceedings, but he assumed his execution would be swift and painless. _Union with a tree._ The thought sickens him. Has any kaldorei ever been so misunderstood as he?

Maiev is still talking, and Illidan once again pays attention, though Maiev is only carping on the same old complaints. "--should have been entirely Jarod's decision. Malfurion had no right to insert himself," Maiev says bitterly. "I only volunteered to be your jailer when he declared you were to live."

He began listening again just in time. "Because you could never have conducted a liasion with me otherwise."

Maiev makes a disgusted noise.

"The difference between you and me, Maiev, is that I would not do this to Tyrande or anyone else."

"You lie," Maiev accuses, and she strikes him with a body blow. Illidan grunts on impact, but the wallop wasn't one of her worst. "You would do anything, if it meant you would win," Maiev accuses.

"There are some lines not even I would cross." Though the thought occurs to him that the longer he stays down here in the dark with her, the more potential there might be for her to twist him. The largest, hardest island of boulder in the seas will with time be changed by the waves plummeting against its surface, constantly smoothing its exterior, wearing the rock away. How many more nights, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries... "Though after long enough in the dark down here with you... who knows. Perhaps I should make no promises."

Maiev says nothing, withdrawing her dagger from his intestines. A small cry originates in his throat, but he will not open his mouth and so the sound is muffled. Wiping the blade off on his thigh, she uses the sharp edge to shave off his sex hair, matted with clotted blood.

He can only resolve once again to hold firm. He waits out another erection, waits out another long residual ache. Then he returns to his memories.

*

One night (or day, who can tell), Malfurion appears in the barrow tunnel entrance, carrying a torch in his hand.

"Illidan." Malfurion comes close to his cage, holds the torch forth and looks at him searchingly. "You're naked," he says as if surprised.

And so he is. No barriers in the way at the moment, his soiled, tattered breeches long since turned into filthy rags even before Maiev first took both leggings and scarf away for one of the drenchings she calls a bath. Sometimes she brings the leggings back, sometimes he goes long periods sitting with his buttocks on cold stone. Better to mostly leave him naked and exposed in the dark, with no physical defenses left to him, and in the bargain humiliating him with the intermittent access to clothing.

Illidan cannot wait to get out of here and never look back.

"Yes, brother." He realizes Malfurion's taken aback by the sight of him undressed, glimpsing him nude for the first time he received since Sargeras' gift. Malfurion stares at the fel markings over his chest and hips and thighs as if dazed by the sight of all of them bared together. Malfurion's eyes linger too on the short-shorn hair between his legs, cleansed of blood but still crisp and closely trimmed after Maiev's cursory shaving job. Uncomfortable, Illidan pulls his knees to his chest to stop Malfurion looking, wrapping his arms around his folded legs. Finally Malfurion's gaze lifts to Illidan's face, and there his eyes stop roving.

Illidan drinks in the mental sight of him in turn. He resents Malfurion, and envies him too, but seeing his brother's irritating mien is nevertheless unexpectedly comforting. Malfurion has grown a full set of antlers, springing from his brow not unlike the horns Cenarius bore aloft. Illidan pictures Malfurion's antlers on himself, because he could have been first druid among their people. 

The mental image is odd. The antlers mark his brother as special, no question, but still Illidan decides he has no desire to grow horns.

Illidan gestures around his cell, and lifts his chin in the direction of his mounted warglaives, so mockingly placed in their proximity. "What then do you think of the prison in which you've set me?"

Malfurion glances over his shoulder and seems startled all over again, and a shadow of guilt crosses Malfurion's face as he straightens. "It is... primitive. And... damp. Do you want a light? I could speak to Tyrande, I am sure she would have a word with Maiev on your behalf--"

Illidan cuts him off. "You've enclosed me with a monster."

"What do you mean?"

Illidan shakes his head slowly, unwilling to speak aloud of the shameful transgressions he's endured, unable to put the violations to words. As though his brother would care, or believe him for that matter. Malfurion is the one who chose to disavow and shut him here.

"You feel regret for your actions, then?" Malfurion seems hopeful.

He almost laughs. Malfurion thinks by _a monster_ Illidan refers to himself, or some part of himself.

"You are a fool," Illidan tells him.

Malfurion stares in at him with pity. "Do you want... perhaps a blanket?"

"Get out."

*

Maiev slaps him back to awareness, to being present in the moment. Illidan takes stock of the situation and realizes the reason for her anger: his cock has failed to respond to her teasing attentions.

He's pleased, though he can't say whether his ongoing attempts to mentally tune out are finally working, or whether his body's simply given up any hope of satisfaction and is responding accordingly.

Either way, Maiev reacts badly. "Get hard or I'll make you hard."

"It seems you can't," Illidan says, his voice rusty. "Congratulations, I suppose you've ruined sex for me. Well done."

Maiev leans close. "I have yet to begin," Maiev whispers, and a chill whispers down Illidan's back.

Maiev turns and leaves him. Illidan cannot say how long she might be gone, but she comes back carrying a short, squat phallus with a narrow neck partway down and a oversized metal circle jutting out of the bottom. The item looks like the ugly semi-precious ring of a giant. It's an ass plug, and a large one. For a second she holds it up in front of him.

"Is this yours? I hope you washed it," Illidan says as Maiev foists it in his face. He sees it's made of jade, and the large ring screwed into the bottom appears to be bronze. He tilts his head back slightly in avoidance, but she presses it up to his lips all the same.

"You have ten seconds to lick it or spit on it and that's all the preparation you're getting," Maiev tells him. "Ten. Nine."

Illidan's heart pounds. He's not particularly knowledgable about such deviant things, but he knows enough to know he wants it wet rather than dry.

"Eight."

The last thing he wants is to have it in his mouth, so gathering saliva on his tongue, he spits on the polished surface.

"Seven. Six. Five." Illidan aims for the far side, for a more or less even distribution of saliva.

"Four. Three," Maiev says, and pulls the plug away before he can spit on it one final time. Liar, liar.

But Illidan decides not to call her out on her untruth. As she crouches down between his legs, internally he debates making his escape attempt, but still he hesitates, for he will only have one try.

His cock still hangs limp as a noodle. "I won't enjoy this, so I don't think you'll get what you're after here. On the other hand, I won't enjoy it, so I suppose that's still a win, isn't it?"

"Spread your legs."

Illidan remains unmoving.

"Or I'll wand you and shove a bigger version in dry."

 _You have a bigger one than that?_

Illidan knows better than to voice the query aloud if she's threatening the wand. Or to kick her, for that matter. He greatly dislikes the wand.

Awkwardly he opens his legs, hating her, and Maiev reaches with the plug between them. Holding the plug by the ring on the bottom, she rams the thing into him in one sudden push. The pain from the area is a shock, but having his eyes burned out was a thousand miles of far greater agony and permanently changed the way Illidan scales pain. Nothing can truly hurt him now. The distress of this implement lies in its shocking intimacy, inserted as it is in a sacrosanct place where nothing is intended to enter. The unique sense of violation is of a measure he's never felt.

Even worse, as the sting begins to pass, he feels stuffed full in a way that's frighteningly erotic, and a minute later his cock starts to respond to the feeling, at last swelling and beginning to stand.

"There it is," Maiev says slowly, watching his cock, and for the first time in a long time Illidan feels a wave of shame course through him.

"Keep it in. If you push it out, I'll get the wand."

The sensation of fullness in his rectum feels not unlike the sensation of needing to defecate, however the plug makes the nerves in the area quiver in an explicitly sexual way. Though not indulgent with food, he's resented the spells of keeping because meals would be a welcome nightly diversion. Now for the first time he's glad his digestive system fell into stasis when he entered the cage, or this experience could be even more repulsive, more awkward.

Maiev commences another round of masturbating him, jerking his cock rhythmically at first, then subsiding to light, flirtatious touches. Her nails scratch gently.

Illidan has had enough. Mental preparation or no, he fights to yank his wrists out of his shackles, but without the added slickness of saliva his wrists won't budge, and he's panicking when careful and precise orientation is needed. He cannot escape this hideous situation. He tries again to disassociate, but Maiev has him between her hand and the thing in his ass, and the sensations are altogether too strong to escape.

Maiev has her way with him, stroking him to a terrible tension and then abandoning him, again and again. He's forced to clamp down around the plug in his ass to keep the heavy jade from slipping out, and even though he hates it the feeling of internal fullness heightens everything, from his arousal to his need to his frustration.

When she finally finishes, she unwinds the winches and says as a parting shot, "Don't even think about taking that out."

He leaves the foul plug in his rectum and lies on his back. The sensation of fullness keeps him turned on and frustrated longer, and then the sensation of openness starts to feel deeply uncomfortable after his arousal finally fades away. Maiev finally removes the blasted thing the next evening.

*

He looks at his thumbs. He's not sure how much time has passed, but he has never chanced to gather any useful information on the guards or the tunnels beyond his prison. He cannot so much as determine a pattern in their rotating schedule. The ass plug was the arrow in the pyre, and he's ready to burn this pit of depravity to charred ash, all four thousand miles of it.

He initially wanted to wait until Maiev visits him again after drinking to excess, but so long passes without such an occasion he wonders if she's now abstaining from alcohol. Inebriated Maiev would be better than sober Maiev. Still, her predilection for putting her hands on his cock loans itself temptingly enough to trouble. When he hears footsteps, he will discreetly spit into both his cuffs. When her attention and both hands are wholly on his cock, and she's not expecting anything from him but moaning and swearing, he will yank his hands out of his shackles as unobtrusively as he can and give the ensuing battle his all.

And at his next opportunity, he does just that.

His attack starts promisingly. His heart pounds with the anticipation, but she notices nothing amiss. As both metacarpals snap, he descends on her. He knees her in the crotch, punches her in the face with one debilitated hand and spins her around. He gets an arm around her neck, compressing her throat before she can catch her breath to scream, and with his other arm he jerks her close, pinning both her arms. Recovering from his intial onslaught, she thrashes against his greater upper body strength. Greater--but barely, Maiev is terrifyingly strong. She gets ahold of one of his mangled thumbs and bends the broken digit to an unnatural angle, and the pain is excrutiating.

But he doesn't let her go. He's winning, and she's fighting to hold on to consciousness, when in a last desperate act Maiev unexpectedly smashes his forehead with the back of her head. The second of slack in his elbow allows her to holler for Califax before he remasters control of her. Illidan's heart sinks, because he won't have time to strangle her to unconsciousness, drag her outside and kill or maim her--he hadn't decided whether she should lose her arms or simply die, he was going to play the situation by ear. 

While he can fight Maiev or Califax separately and win, he cannot take them both on together. The horror of it is dizzying: he will not be able to make it out.

He could hurt her now, but any harm he inflicts will be promptly mended, so with his remaining moments of freedom Illidan draws in his arm around her neck, pulls her ear to his mouth and speaks softly. "When our positions are reversed... for every time you have touched me against my will only to deny me release--for every time I will take my satisfaction in you twice."

"And you claimed lines existed you would not cross," Maiev shrieks, still struggling.

Anguished, Illidan forces himself to remain composed. "What can I say? You're a bad influence, Warden."

Califax gallops into the barrow entrance to free Maiev, shouting.

"I will be as monstrous as you imagine I am," he promises in her ear, "and what you have done to me will be a shadow of what I will do to you."

Califax shocks him with the lightning wand, after which Maiev beats him to a bloody pulp right in front of Califax. His last memory is Maiev hauling him out of the cell and Califax shocking him into unconsciousness. When Illidan wakes back in his cell, the iron shackles clamped around his wrists are much more constricting, fitted snugly to the bones in his wrists.

Crushed that his long-awaited chance came to nothing, Illidan has little hope for a second opportunity. He retreats into his memory again. He sleeps as often as he can, for as long as he can, throwing himself into his haunted, angry dreams.

*

Illidan remains silent, holding back his breath as much as he can. He suppresses all signs of impending orgasm, and holds his pelvis as motionless as he can during an interval of full-hand stroking. He tries to keep a lid on all the possible tells until he feels himself finally edge past the point at which he could stop himself coming, and then he rocks into her hands two more crucial little thrusts and begins to orgasm, his whole body stiffening.

Unfortunately, Maiev angrily snatches her hand back as if burned, leaving him to spurt untouched. The impending ecstacy suddenly fizzles away, robbing him of the euphoria that he should be his. He finds nothing redeeming about the experience save for the base mechanical relief of emptying his pent-up, overloaded balls into the cool barrow air.

Illidan refuses to bellow out his frustration, though the rage in his chest chokes him. He refuses to let on that these circumstances are anything other than a success for him.

"Thank you. It was good for me," he claims with a gracious smile.

Maiev punches him, breaking his nose in a shower of blood splatter, and as punishment leaves him winched against the wall.

*

They wage a brief sexual war between them. Illidan endeavors to conceal how close he is to coming, the better to fool her and slip under her radar. She endeavors to prevent him. Over fourteen visits he achieves three unsatisfying orgasms in this fashion, though without contact continuing through his ejaculation the orgasms are no true relief, and in a way are even more frustrating than the outright denials. The sole consolation is that his groin doesn't ache for hours afterwards.

Then Maiev prevails on that front too, when after one such joyless ejaculation, she resumes touching him. Cupping the curves of his body to collect his come, she uses his fluid to stroke him freely, without reservation and without pause despite his post-coital hypersensitivity, her hands rubbing his cock raw. She continues until he eventually grows hard again, miserable all the while. She strokes him until he shoots painfully into empty air again, untouched and pleasureless as before but this time like all his nerves are on fire. He groans and grinds his teeth.

He thinks she might halt, but then she resumes again. He's badly overstimulated, and she continues jacking his cock until his nerves are screaming for mercy and he's fighting to keep silent through his clenched jaw and failing, moaning from his throat.

"Beg me to stop," Maiev suggests, "and perhaps I will."

Illidan shakes his head, and for his fit of pride he earns another onslaught of painful overstimulation, until he's frantic and convulsing in his bondage and crying out openly. His cock remains stubbornly soft, and from a pocket in her cloak Maiev pulls out the ass plug--no, a larger version, Azsunite if he knows his stones--and he winces as she shoves it in dry. 

He cannot hold back his scream when he comes a third time.

"Betrayer," Maiev says, "if you think I can't do this for another five or six hours, you are wrong."

Cringing from her hands, twisting in his shackles, heart thudding in his esophagus, and terrible scorched discomfort scraping from every nerve in his groin, he caves in a flood of words. "Please, all right. Maiev, Warden, please stop, I beg you, please stop, I will not do it again."

And blessings of the Mother Moon, Maiev stops. "Please," he goes on even as she's walking out to lock his cell and unwind the winches. Illidan hangs his head, beaten, and unwilling to let her see his face.

He's already learned not to fight becoming erect but instead to accept arousal in stride, to actively embrace it even, because if he fails to harden for her, he gets the plug shoved rudely into his ass. Now he dares not try again to bypass her regimen of torment. He realizes she's training him to endure sexual activity on her terms, under her full control, with no physical attempts at subversion.

True to his word, while he continues to attempt to control his bodily reactions to her stimulation, he quits trying to deceive her about his proximity to orgasm. Untouched climaxes are wretched, anyway. He was not getting away with much.

*

Illidan wakes up to see Malfurion sitting silently in Maiev's chair.

"Forgive me for watching you sleep. People do it to me, but I suppose that is no excuse. I thought about leaving, but..." Malfurion clears his throat. "I wanted to see you."

Illidan shifts, groggy from a long slumber, but the sight of his brother clears his mind. He sits up, crossing his legs in front of him.

"You're dressed," Malfurion observes relatively cheerfully. "I'm glad."

Illidan chuckles, his voice raspy for his first few words. "Yes. Occasionally my leggings are vouchsafed. How lucky I am." He taps the skin beside the corner of one eye, calling Malfurion's attention to his bared felflame eyes. He would prefer them covered if he had a choice. "My scarf is behind you."

A frown crosses Malfurion's face as he looks back, studying the display until he sees where Illidan's scarf has been folded and hung from the center of his warglaives. Malfurion makes an abortive shift in Maiev's chair, as though he's about to rise and retrieve the scarf but thinks better of it. Knowing Malfurion as well as he does, Illidan feels capable of reading into his movement: are the barrows prisons so entirely under Maiev's control that even his brother hesitates to intervene? It's interesting, and dismaying. Perhaps Malfurion thinks, as Maiev does, that he has meddled enough where Illidan's welfare is concerned.

Illidan cares little for getting the scarf returned to him. Maiev would only take it away again, even if Malfurion were to hand the length of fabric through the bars. Still, returning his scarf would have been a nice symbolic gesture.

They sit in silence for a few moments, looking at one another. Illidan finds he's far more reluctant to send his only visitor away now that he has no further hope of escape. "You look well, brother. I see you're letting Tyrande dress you now."

Tyrande is obviously curating Malfurion's selection of clothes, while Maiev sometimes allows Illidan a single garment. Life is appallingly unfair.

Malfurion glances down at his raiment, still nothing overly fancy, but certainly richer and more dignified than the plain jerkin and worn leathers he used to favor. His cloak is embroidered with autumn leaves and trimmed in white fur with a fine metal clasp in front, and the bracers around his forearms are embossed with intertwined druidic and kaldorei symbols.

Malfurion looks embarrassed. "Yes."

"A wise decision."

Malfurion smiles, though his face looks clouded.

"How is Tyrande?"

Malfurion's lips part, a frown touches his brow, and he sounds like he's about to say something Illidan has no interest in hearing. "Illidan--"

Cross at his expression and his tone both, Illidan cuts him off. "Might I not ask after one of my oldest friends?"

Malfurion's face softens, and Illidan's stomach twists to see the love and tenderness written there. "She is well," Malfurion says at last. "She leads our people with determination and grace."

Illidan nods, expecting no more information than that, and not wanting to hash out the topic of what both of them now realize was a long-running rivalry for Tyrande's hand. A competition that somehow he lost. "Tell me of the outside."

Malfurion looks down at his folded hands. Any discourse between them promises to be stilted and faltering. "Well... in southern Hyjal the grain planting has begun." He speaks haltingly; they both know nearly every topic of interest they might discuss is fraught. "Some of the Broadleafs have started a new vineyard. Our people continue to settle in Hyjal and explore high and wide throughout Ashenvale. At Lake Falathim we have a new outpost." Malfurion fiddles restlessly with his hands, twisting the silver and chalcedony ring on his middle finger, then seems to catch himself and stops. "Recently a number of the fishermen have reported a decrease in the levels of mountain trout, so they've been told to temporarily decrease the numbers they fish up. Catching and releasing, and ah... making certain not to disturb the spawning. Everyone is eating more striped lurker. A good deal more."

Illidan has been listening with as much patience as he can feign, but at this last he makes a face and waves a hand dismissively. These topics are safer to broach than anything of greater consequence, but the dreary minutiae of farming and fishing did not interest him when he was free, and they do not interest him now.

Malfurion notes his unstated preference and switches gears. "I have some promising new students. I have spent a bit of time in Moonglade. And ... ah... scouts are seeing some incursions of satyrs in the southern forests."

This last tidbit of news sharpens Illidan's attention. "Whereabouts?"

"Oh, various spots. Around the Rim, and in the Nightsong Woods. Nothing major or especially concerning. Only..." Malfurion pauses, his gaze roaming around the inside of the cage. "...small groups here and there. Soren Moonfall, Priestess Maestra--you remember Maestra?--and a few others have led raids to slaughter and drive them back." He smiles grimly. "Though several times they've turned up in a particular section of Nightsong, and they did manage to desecrate a shrine... some have started calling the area 'Satyrnaar.'"

Illidan frowns, rises and begins to pace, dragging his chains. He should be on the front lines, leading against such tainted invaders. Fighting fire with fire. "Give me specific numbers. How many incidents, how far spaced apart in time?"

"Do not worry about it," Malfurion says. "We have the situation well under control."

Illidan is not mollified by these reassurances, but Malfurion seems disinclined to say more on the subject.

Illidan turns, facing Malfurion and changing the subject. "Does my new Well nurture your people?"

" _Your_ Well, and _my_ people?"

"Clearly your ears work."

"Illidan." Malfurion seems dismayed. "Are we not your people?"

Illidan holds up his wrists, making the links of his chains clink. "Have I not been disowned?"

Malfurion sighs. "As to the We-- the arcane-contaminated lake, you have gotten your way. Though we considered the possibility of destroying it, no way existed to do so safely. The Dragon Aspects together grew and blessed a World Tree on the site."

"I know," Illidan says, and Malfurion looks at him quizzically. "You grew the Tree before you put me down here and I have told you, I see now like never before. Do you think a few walls, chains and a scarf would stop me seeing a tree the size of a thousand full-grown dragons?"

Malfurion looks unnerved before he drops his chin, regarding his hands in his lap as if gathering his thoughts. Illidan continues to view his expression, even placed as it is out of what would be a normal line of sight. "I suppose not. In any case, the Tree dilutes the power of the lake you... infused. The Tree nurtures us now."

"Brother," Illidan says after a space of silence. "Do you truly..." He lets out a frustrated breath. "Do you truly think this punishment commeasurate with my crimes?"

Malfurion looks back up at him, his expression turning dark and steely in an infuriating, long-familiar way. "I think you're dangerous, Illidan. I don't know what else we could have done with you. I didn't want to see you killed."

"It would have been kinder," Illidan growls, and Malfurion shakes his head.

"No. I am not certain it would have been."

So Malfurion knows... and agrees. Illidan's fury passes, and in the aftermath he feels only emptiness. He sits back down on his usual flagstone. "I see."

"Do you?"

"Maiev expressed as much," Illidan says, numb.

"Jarod Shadowsong is a good man, but easily swayed, susceptible to the last person to speak persuasive words to him. I fear he too easily allows others to bend his ear."

"As he let you."

"Well, yes," Malfurion says, as though only just now realizing this hypocrisy. "I rather meant his sister's influence, and others, but ... yes, he did."

For another half a minute they sit in silence.

Malfurion seems to be wavering over his next words. "Is Maiev..." Malfurion hesitates again. "Is Maiev kind to you?"

Illidan laughs at the way the question is phrased, but if ever there was an opener, a time to reveal the truth, this is that moment. Yet Illidan finds he still cannot bear to speak the words. Shame keeps him silent.

 _She hurts me. She injures me beyond what would kill me were I not healed by the enchantments of this cage. For hours she strokes my cock but denies me release. Regularly she unmans me with an ass plug about yea high._ Worse and worse. If he confessed Maiev's mistreatment, nothing that's happened in this cell would be worse than Malfurion's skepticism. On the other hand, if Malfurion did believe him, his brother would tell Tyrande of his shame, and Illidan cannot bear the idea of Tyrande imagining him in the ways Maiev has humiliated him. And were he not removed from Maiev's tender care and word of his accusations got back to her, the situation would undoubtedly escalate and worsen. Maiev probably watches the two of them right now via a scrying spell.

"You can leave me now." Illidan lowers his head, though he continues to watch Malfurion.

Malfurion looks troubled, like he wants to say more, but he respects the instruction and rises to go. "I will visit you again," he says before he leaves.

*

"Warden." One night Illidan tries to goad her as she strokes him to another bout of lengthy misery. "Maiev. Tell me, what are you waiting for?"

Maiev looks up with a frown, her expression without comprehension.

Illidan lets his head droop down to her, murmuring close and intimate by her cheek. "When are you going to fuck me?"

"Never, you disgusting beast," Maiev rages, so instantly wrathful Illidan knows he's struck gold. Struck a nerve. A golden nerve perhaps. Language becomes shaky when she hits him. The blow she lands to his cheekbone momentarily makes his mind vision a blur of color.

Still he continues. "We both know you want to climb on my cock, and you might as well. Hitting me must make you dripping wet. If anything ever slicks your cunt, I'm guessing it's this."

She decorates the other side of his face with a matching blow. His head strikes the packed earth behind him, and he feels the contrecoup. Both cheekbones might be shattered now.

"You are not quite my type, but go ahead, take my cock in your mouth and let's see how--"

Maiev viciously breaks his nose. Illidan hears the sick crunch and feels the explosion of blood over his face. His words come out even more garbled after that, but he can tell she understands him well enough. "Do you have one of your Watchers take care of you after--"

"Shut your foul mouth, demon-lover," Maiev demands, and she administers a violent squeeze to his balls.

He shouts for a second in pain, but he refuses to let it stop him. "Y-you should let me l-lick it out of you," he stutters, and a follow-up punch to his sack effectively ends the conversation because Illidan cannot speak or even breathe. He writhes in his bonds, unable to hunch defensively over as all his instincts scream.

She goes back to torturing him in the usual way, which feels a thousand times worse after having his testicles pummeled, but his cock stays resolutely flaccid even after she jams the plug into his ass. When she touches him, he moans until he can force himself to stop.

Maiev gives up eventually. When she's looked her fill, Maiev exits the cage and unwinds the winches, and Illidan's able to curl up on the ground.

The lesson is not soon forgotten. A long time passes before he provokes her in that manner again.

*

He's been on the edge for too long. He can't keep any sense of passing hours, but he counts twenty-three times he's almost, almost peaked and at the twenty-fourth he can't keep his cool any longer. He usually loses his temper, sooner or later. His balls feel agonizingly full, churning and throbbing and laden with all the come she won't let him unload, as what she's made him need so desperately is once again denied him.

"You fucking bitch," he snarls.

She's learned his body, and her manual finesse is unbearable. She knows when to pump his cock quickly, when to slow down, when to reduce the stimulation to feathery petting with fingertips, and when to stop entirely and leave him with no touch at all, letting the minutes tick past. She knows how long to wait before she starts back up, to maximize his suffering.

In her hands, so to speak, he has no hope of ever reaching orgasm again.

He lets go of any determination he once to had to be outwardly stoic. "I hope you die alone and in pain," he tells her clearly. She brooks no straightforward disobedience without the punishment of a blow, but she allows his backtalk. Probably, he thinks, because she enjoys his rage.

Maiev only smiles, lightly stroking a fingertip over his cock again.

Later, after Cordana replaces her, an inrush of rebellion spurs him and he jerks off openly, spreading his legs and luxuriating in the feeling. Cordana refrains from interfering, though Illidan takes no heed to maintenance of the barrow's typical dead quiet. He doesn't particularly care what Maiev does to him afterwards. Defiantly he pleasures himself twice more in the following hours.

*

He soon comes to regret giving in to impulse.

He's been in the stress position against the wall for what feels like months or years. He sleeps in fitful microbursts but quickly jerks awake, and he can find no true rest. His arms throb with infuriatingly dull, yet agonizing pain from his inability to change position, at his wrists from the terrible drag of his shackles and around his shoulders where the limbs feel ready to pop from their sockets. His feet are swollen from so much time with gravity pulling his blood down with no respite. Shifting his weight from foot to foot provides no relief. When Maiev finally returns to torment him again, he's babbling and raving.

"Maiev, you bitch. All this time wandering." He struggles against his bonds, though he can move no more than before and everything hurts just as much. 

"I have other duties besides keeping you, Betrayer."

"Cut to the chase and cut them off already." He propels his hips out at her, and in his temporary insanity he means these words. The parts meant for pleasure are a source of suffering to him now, nothing more. He would be well rid of them. Then she would have no reason to continue to deprive him of rest.

Maiev looks surprised, then thoughtful and tempted all in a second, and then she laughs. "I prefer you like this."

"Bring me your dagger then, I'll do it. Think of the time, the time you'd free up in your night... so much time, all this time passing... just give me your endgame."

"Oh, I will always make time for you." Maiev winds her hand in his loose, greasy mess of hair, jerking his head around, making him groan. "However many prisoners I take, however wide-ranging my responsibilities become, I will always come back for you. That is a promise, Betrayer."

"Let me down, you virago," he says, half an insult, half a plea. He hates to beg, but he cannot stop himself after so much time awake and in this thrice-damned outstretched standing position. "The brightness in my mind--"

She reaches to his groin. "You're shaking," Maiev observes, sounding amused.

"Yes. Your-- like the willow tree." His body cannot decide whether to try to thrust into her loosely gathered fist or try haplessly to escape her touch. His hands ball and squeeze and release. "I hate you, Maiev. When I have you, you will never get out."

"No, _you_ will never get out."

Maiev brings him to the edge a handful of times, until if he still possessed his amber eyes he would cry, and he screams because his arms feel liable to fall off and because he wishes they would so he could get some relief, and because he senses the looming mouth of madness descending to swallow him. He only wants his chains loosened, to be allowed to rest and to sleep, to be free from this waking horror-dream. Maiev's torment lasts for what might as well be forever, but when she finally leaves she unwinds the winches, letting him fall to his knees and wrap his arms around himself and rock and pass out. The ache that emanates from his groin is nothing.

He sleeps long.

*

When he wakes, he acknowledges bleakly to himself that he is outmatched. He is well and truly trammeled in this cell, and with her total control over his existence, Maiev has the means to tame him, to curb all his bridling like he's an nightsaber she's training for a steed. No outward disobedience will be allowed him.

But his grim determination to stay unbroken within never wavers or weakens. Rather, his will to survive this tribulation strengthens, for he is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has a destiny greater than sitting alone in a dark prison, being beaten and tormented by a hated adversary unto their shared eviternity.

His abrasive jailer has bested him... for now. But Illidan possesses tenacity most can only dream of. He will never give up.

In time, his body grows accustomed to the feeling of perpetual sexual denial. He sleeps, he wakes, he endures Maiev's sessions of unwelcome touching and the punishment of prohibition that follows, until it's simply another desolate dimension of his life in his cell.

*

Illidan's naked the next time Malfurion enters the barrow. His brother makes no comment, nor does he sit down in Maiev's chair.

"Illidan." Malfurion studies him. "How do you fare?"

Illidan shrugs. "I still exist."

"Maiev says you have kept your sanity intact."

"No thanks to her."

"She thinks you demonstrate no contrition," Malfurion says.

Illidan snorts at that, but then he pauses. "Is that what you're waiting for, then? Me to lose my mind?"

"No. But we knew--we know--it is a risk."

"Why are you so..." Illidan struggles to put his finger on Malfurion's manner. His brother is speaking quickly, and the muscles of his shoulders and neck are rigid with tension. He's under stress and evidently in a hurry; he hasn't even set the torch he carries into the wall sconce, like he has no intent to stay long. "...so harried and impatient? Like your clothes are full of poison oak leaves."

Malfurion rubs the bridge of his nose with his free hand, sighing as though letting go of a measure of tension. "Trouble with the satyrs. They have found leadership, a general who is all too clever, a thorn in our side."

"I knew it," Illidan says, rising triumphantly. "When you first brought it up, I knew."

Malfurion speaks to the floor, and Illidan can see the lines of stress settling back into his forehead. His brother is acquiring a creased and careworn look--Malfurion with wrinkles, a strange thought. "Xalan he is called. They have numbers we did not realize, and we now engage in battle on multiple fronts."

Illidan's come urgently to the cage door before his brother even finishes speaking. "Let me out then."

Malfurion gives him a look, making him stop short. "Illidan. No."

Illidan repeats his brother blankly. "No?"

"Of course not." Malfurion sounds exasperated. "Be realistic."

"You have need of me," Illidan protests, starting to get angry. "This world has need of me, so free me and let me fight this war for you!"

Malfurion shakes his head in his disapproving fatherly way, as though he thinks himself an authority figure, and Illidan knows he will not be persuaded. "No."

"But no one can fight the satyrs like I could! Why are you here, if not to free me so I can once again protect our world?"

"Forget the satyrs, forget I said anything. I came not to speak of worldly matters, merely to check in on you." Malfurion sighs. "I should not even have mentioned the war. I only thought you would want news." 

Illidan snarls, stymied and seething. What he wants is to scream out his rage, or better yet to put his hands around his brother's neck and squeeze. "So it's a full-on war then."

Malfurion comes to the cage door and leans forward, pressing him impatiently. "Do you repent of your actions, Illidan? Have you learned any wisdom in your seclusion?"

"Seclusion?!" Illidan hears the edge of hysteria in his voice, and he laughs bitterly. In some ways his precious brother torments him as badly as Maiev does. "Seclusion, mmm. Perhaps not to the degree you had in mind. I had wisdom enough when I came here. Have you picked up any common sense? Any ability to, say, judge character?"

"Do you feel no repentence at all for the lives you ended or the harm you've done?" Malfurion fires the question off with harshly obvious frustration. "Don't you want to change, to reform? Don't you want to leave this prison somenight?"

Lying would be pointless and so Illidan will not bother. "Yes, of course I do." Illidan takes the last step to the bars, aware of the drag of his heavy chains as he hadn't been when he leapt up thinking Malfurion had come to free him. He approaches his brother as closely as he's able, bringing his face to the bars. "But I will not lie to you. I will not pretend. I would kill a thousand, a thousand thousand, to do what no one else would or could do to save our world from the Legion. I would do it all again. And for that I should have been hailed as our people's greatest hero."

Malfurion says no more, only turns his back and leaves. He takes the torch with him.

*

Illidan's been on the edge for hours, on and off and on and off again. Maiev caresses his length slowly, a luxurious touch, but not enough. Never enough.

The only sound in the cell is his heavy breathing. Though he's tantalizingly close, he remains still when she makes a circle of her fist, rather than start to thrust. She'll only take her hand away if he tries.

"I think you're starting to enjoy this too much," Maiev says.

Illidan snorts, still breathing hard from arousal. "Because I suffer through it quietly? No." Yet he's grown used to Maiev's disturbing punitive measures, and he no longer feels as miserable about it as he first did. Aching soreness, pressure and discomfort in his most private parts are the accepted standard, and he no longer yells out his frustration or curses her name. He grunts, he shifts restlessly at intense moments, sometimes he writhes but nothing more. Those things are true.

"You've forgotten what you need."

"I don't need anything from you," Illidan says automatically, but after a second's delay he processes her meaning and his lips part.

"Yes, you do," Maiev says, and her fingers encircle his cock with unmistakable meaning.

Still he doubts her intent, skeptical that she means what she implies. Most likely this suggestion is her attempt at a new branching-off of psychological warfare. She will not let him finish. She never willingly allows him release.

"Thrust," she tells him.

"Why?"

Maiev lays a stinging slap across his thigh. "Do as I tell you."

Illidan holds still another moment, then complies, sliding forward into her grip.

"Again," Maiev commands. "Why so hesitant? You'll enjoy it."

Illidan rolls his hips back and forward again, fully expecting her to pull away, but to his surprise Maiev keeps her hand tight around him. Whatever the rules of her newest game, a narrow hope arises in him for relief, the first such aspiration he's had in ages. Maiev's hand stays sealed around him for another few moments and another couple of thrusts, and the hope expands and crashes over him suddenly. He craves an orgasm with a terrible lust and need, but then he stops hard and thinks twice. He's accustomed to his reduced conditions. He's not certain he wants to remember how good it feels to have this aching pressure suddenly dissolve in a wash of unalloyed pleasure.

He balks and ceases moving his pelvis, tacitly refusing her order. "I would enjoy it more if we ceased these little one-sided trysts."

Maiev hisses disapproval and resumes rubbing him of her own volition, on her own steam, long firm strokes moving his foreskin in the way she knows makes him respond. Out of sheer stubbornness he finds himself fighting her influence, struggling against her now for control of his body, because he doesn't want her to have this, too.

"Now you're fighting me just to fight me," Maiev says pointedly.

Illidan's heart is pounding. "Because I do not like being forced." He knows he wages a losing battle. She holds her body unusually close to his, and she suddenly pins his pelvis with one sharp hip so he can't squirm. When he clumsily kicks sideways at her, she catches both his legs in one of her own, balancing gracefully on one foot as if his attempts to lash out are beneath her notice. She uses two hands and all her concentration on him, and he's near enough the edge that bringing him over takes no time at all.

In the end, rather than fight both Maiev and his own powerful urge, Illidan fucks her closed hand forcefully, answering his basest animal instinct for carnal satisfaction.

The orgasm rolls through him like a thunderclap, like a grand act of the magic of which she's deprived him. His head lolls, his anchorless flame-orb eyes roll around in his empty sockets, he feels his toes curling, and the release of all his pent-up need is exquisite, extended and profound. All the come she's generated with her teasing gushes out of his cock, shooting up into the air several times before continuing in smaller, lower streams and eddies. By the time he's finished he's dampened his chest and stomach, his thighs and the floor, and he's coated Maiev's hands to boot.

Maiev strokes him lavishly through his seismic completion, then lets him rock into her fist until the last little flashes of pleasure have dissipated. When his hips entirely still, she wipes both her hands off along his buttock and upper thigh, grimacing.

"What--?" The question comes to his lips somewhat breathlessly, and he cannot figure out how to finish the query. _What just happened, why did you do that?_ Not for his benefit, certainly. Will she take everything from him?

Maiev looks away, towards the prison door, and then she walks away, speaking over her shoulder. "You needed a reminder of what you can't have."

Illidan slumps against the wall until she unwinds the winches, letting him ease to the flagstones. Maiev looks back at him once before she dons her helm and gauntlets and departs away from his cage down the tunnel, her face impassive. 

As her footfalls fade away, he wonders how long he'll be down here.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. And then Illidan turned the tables... and did very little to Maiev, lawl.  
> 2\. Title from the song _Prison Grove_ by Warren Zevon.  
>  3\. Regarding the style of buttplug described, I had something akin to this in mind, but with a narrowed neck for staying power and with the ring screwed in at the bottom rather than fused on because the angle of that ring looks quite uncomfortable. The more you know!  
> https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2762659/ancient-dildos-butt-plugs-discovered-china/


End file.
